> Google Protobuf is a lot closer than Parquet or Avro. But Protobuf is not a splitable format, which means it is not Big Data friendly, unlike Parquet, Avro an

> Google Protobuf is a lot closer than Parquet or Avro. But Protobuf is not a splitable format, which means it is not Big Data friendly, unlike Parquet, Avro and CSV. Eh, I don't think that's the problem. If that was the problem, there are a zillion ways to chunk files; .tar is probably the most ubiquitous but there are others. The bigger problem is that Protobuf is way harder to use. Part of the reason CSV is underspecified is it's simple enough it feels, at first glance, like it doesn't need specification. Protobuf has enough dark corners that I definitely don't know all of it, despite having used it pretty extensively. I think Unicode Separated Values (USV) is a much better alternative and as another poster mentioned, I hope it takes off.